Friday, January 31, 2014

I am so excited to share with you not only my first finish of 2014, but my first quilt finish ever!

My best friend, Laura is expecting a little girl March 4 and as soon as she told us she was pregnant, I knew I had to make the little one a quilt :) The great thing is, with all the snow days we had in the beginning of January, I was able to finish it before her shower.

Laura originally told me that she wanted pink and purple as her color scheme, but when I started laying out the pluses it looked too two-dimensional with only two colors. So I took a cue from the Erin McMorris fabric (lower right in the above pic) and pulled some peach into the quilt.

I tried to lay out the fabrics so that they were pretty evenly distributed between the different colors and shades.

I quilted it with a Pumpkin Seed walking foot design which took about 2 days, but mostly because I wasn't very comfortable with wrangling a quilt under my machine and it took me a few passes to get the hang of it.

It's backed with lavender Minky (you can also see the quilting better on the solid side) -- which is sooooooo soft! I think I just might back all my quilts in Minky!

The binding is a Riley Blake polka dot that matched the Minky. I machine attached it using the tutorial from CluckCluckSew.

There are a lot of firsts in this quilt for me, and I am so proud of it. It has definitely given me the confidence to have a great (ahem lovely) year of finishes this year. I hope baby girl gets lots of use out of it and that she loves it as much as I do!

Monday, January 6, 2014

2013 was a year of building skills and dappling in multiple projects that struck my fancy. 2014 will be my year to finish projects! In order to hopefully keep myself on track, I am going to participate in a Lovely Year of Finishes. I didn't really get into the blogging world until last summer so I missed out on a good chunk of the party last year.

(IG pics ahead since I generally work on things in the evening and I'm terrible at taking in-progress pictures)

My best friend is having a little girl, due in March. Her shower is January 11. So my challenge after the new year was to finish a baby quilt in 10 days! Save the fact that I have not yet finished an entire quilt, I've been working my tail off to get this gift finished :)

The quilt top is finished, and I spent the weekend working on quilting. I think the only thing that allowed me to get this done is the 1 1/2 snow days we had last week. I hope to have it completely quilting, bound and finished by Thursday (I have to since I'm leaving for the shower in PA Friday night).